


this above all

by ishka



Series: stage business [1]
Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-17
Updated: 2017-01-17
Packaged: 2018-09-18 01:15:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9358064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishka/pseuds/ishka
Summary: When he re-openedThe Rockhopper,Makoto installed a cute bell chime for the door to hear his prospective customers saunter in on the off chance he was not in front to greet them. Every patron counts especially when historically, there’s an eighty-seven percent chance they’re drinking the most bottom shelf battery acid he sells.However, because Rin Matsuoka exists, Makoto took the bell off within four days and stepped on it to make sure it never chimed again.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is a casual endeavor purely for mine and [sierra's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sierra) amusement. we'll periodically add short stories to this same au verse/series which will range from silly to not, gen to explicit, short to long, feature some different character combos, etc. just sort of whatever we feel like needs to be added and on no particular schedule.

When he re-opened _The Rockhopper_ , Makoto installed a cute bell chime for the door to hear his prospective customers saunter in on the off chance he was not in front to greet them. Every patron counts especially when historically, there’s an eighty-seven percent chance they’re drinking the most bottom shelf battery acid he sells.

However, because Rin Matsuoka exists, Makoto took the bell off within four days and stepped on it to make sure it never chimed again.

Typically he opens the bar and closes the bar, six days a week, with a ninety-minute gap midday for a break. Gou comes in to start her shift just as he leaves for his break and closes four of those days, and covers his one day off for her fifth day. Makoto doesn’t wear his overworked and underpaid medal as a badge of honor. It’s actually terrible, but he can’t afford to pay another employee just yet and like hell will he ask Gou to put in more than she does. This was his dumb idea to get into this together, not hers.

So was the bell, which she warned him against, her frequent-flyer brother listed as Exhibit A in the _cons_ column.

Today’s the rare quarterly day for dreaded inventory, and both Makoto and Gou arrived at 9:13 and 9:33 respectively for their agreed upon 9:00 AM headstart. It’s nearly noon and time to open, and as with the quarters before it, they have not allotted enough time to get this done in a single morning.

“Where does all of this shit come from?!” Gou whines. “Makoto, there are twelve bottles of well vodka on this shelf.”

“Twelve is bar standard,” Makoto argues.

She points her pen at him accusingly. “Sure, for a bar that sells anything other than armpit sweat beer. Of which there are only two kegs left, as an aside.”

Makoto frowns. “I just put an order in. It depletes faster than I can afford to order it.”

“That’s because you keep things like keep twelve bottles of well vodka on hand!”

His face heats up with embarrassment, because maybe he should know better by now after two years, but he’s not going down without a fight. “The vodka is cheap!”

“Four bottles of coconut rum is not, and you just ordered those three weeks ago. See a pattern?”

“Haru wanted that stocked, it’s not a consistent thing.”

“Well you don’t order him three bottles! Unless you’re charging him two-thousand yen a shot, you’re not making your money back on it in a timely manner. And knowing Haru, he’s already sick of it! We are _so_ not his Napa Valley detour or his free sample table.”

He keeps it to himself that Haru is, in fact, sick of it already and that he only charged him two-hundred yen a shot. Gou narrows her eyes progressively tighter over each moment of silence Makoto commits to, and surely she figures that out anyway.

“Cool it on the bottles,” she says with finality. “We have enough. No more special orders. No cases. And consult the sales ledger I so meticulously steward for just this reason before you order.”

Makoto didn’t figure himself _that_ bad, but then again that’s what inventory time is for. To expose their greatest business weaknesses. Weaknesses to best friends and pricey knick knacks, in particular. Gou, perfect angel she figures herself to be, is guilty of the latter. “Only if you let me break lease on that Touchtunes machine. You are the only person who has used it in the five months we’ve had it, and we’re in the hole for ten-thousand a month on it now.”

Gou gasps and hugs her clipboard to her chest. _“No._ If I don’t have the music, I have to listen to the customers!”

Makoto shrugs and turns back to counting boxes of bar napkins. Those, they can never have enough of. Sloppy drunks. “And Haru really wants to try that chili pepper lager…”

Sometimes Gou is best described as a whistling tea kettle, like now, the way she screams into her closed mouth. Her brother doesn’t offer the same courtesy of muting himself under the same brand of emotional duress. “Fine! I’ll break the lease on the dumb jukebox just to prove I sacrifice, just as much as you!”

“I love inventory,” Makoto says both giddily and sarcastically, a wide smile cooing his words. He checks his watch to see he’s out of time and finishes scrawling down his five cases of bar napkins in its proper row. “I need to open. Already ten ‘til.”

“I’m surprised we haven’t heard Rin break a window to get in yet.”

“Don’t you jinx that,” he chides as he dusts his knees off and heads towards the door. “Maybe he found a _j-o-b._ ” If he spells it out, it wards off more jinxing, so he’s been told.

Gou rolls her eyes. “Oh he has a job, Makoto! The future Kenneth Branagh, remember? A free agent entrepreneur and acting consultant!”

Makoto pauses in the doorway to respond, one ear out to the floor just in case Rin really would try to break in. “A _broke_ agent with a revolving tab debt, and if he breaks one of my windows he’ll finally have his own original tragedy to pitch.”

“Well it would give our dearly departed Bill a rest from all that rolling around he does in his grave whenever Rin attempts to adapt one of his plays, right?”

“ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ will never be the same again…” Makoto mutters as his focus glazes over at the memory of whatever the holy fuck he sat through at the Iwatobi Community Theater a year prior. It sure wasn’t anything like _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ , and a lot more like how he pictured the musical _Cats_ would be if he’d gone to see it fully tripped on acid, so he went ahead and checked that one off his mental bucket list the same night.

He leaves her to her task to open the register, stopping by the closet with the safe for the till. He wishes he was surprised to find Rin at his closed bar already, as if he were summoned by his mere utterance, but really the only unguarded squeak that gets past Makoto is mild and quickly forgotten.

“Door was unlocked,” Rin greets.

“Inventory,” Makoto answers yet doesn’t, distracted by Rin’s billowing white poet shirt and skin-tight black leggings, tied off nicely with a ratty pair of flip-flops. “Dress rehearsal?”

“Oh, is that what it was?” Rin lays in with venom, and Makoto thinks it’s too early for this. “Because with the way no one showed up but me and the facility custodian, least of all that- that _sloth_ , that cruel, _heartless_ goblin of a man, you’d think I was just some sort of hack! With no control over my own production!”

Makoto rolls his lips in to stifle a snort and smiles tightly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

Rin’s gaze follows him as he sets up the bar. “He came over for dinner, we had- we- Makoto stop moving around and listen for a minute. We had a wonderful night. It was so _real_ and genuine, you know? He said-”

Makoto rests his hip on the bar and folds his arms. “The goblin?”

“Yes, keep up. He said he only wanted me! He’s never said anything so impassioned, so raw and personal- and I was so touched and inspired-!” Rin closes his eyes and pauses dramatically over a weighty sigh for levity (or perhaps only to search his vocabulary for more adjectives he hasn’t used yet) before continuing. “He said he should move in, and I was so enraptured at the thought… the love we made-”

“You and the goblin?”

Rin’s eyes snap open through a crack in this bullshit ascended thespian demeanor. “Makoto! I’m fucking getting to it!” He clears his throat. “ _So_. In the midst of our throes, we lost track of time as we often do, and it was the dead of night, moonlight streaming through the windows- he was in my arms! He wanted to sleep, and he’s so beautiful… have you ever really looked at his eyes? He is, bar none, the most gorgeous man that has ever existed, and I-”

That’s Makoto’s cue to keep on doing what he started. He has about two minutes of interrupted soliloquy to do whatever he wants before Rin returns to reality to get to his damn point. The till is set, the POS computer is on, the lights lend that appetizing fluorescence to all the top-shelf liquor no one drinks. The beer tap was recently serviced and cleaned, and it is dazzling. Last month, he sanded and re-stained the bar top itself after what has to have been twenty years of neglect before his ownership. Now it shines. Profitable or not, Makoto is proud of his shitty bar.

Now if only he could take home a full paycheck, so Sousuke didn’t have to work so much.

“- so, I said, what the ever loving _fuck_ , Haru?! If you don’t cap the fucking toothpaste, it hardens around the opening and gets gross. It’s not cheap! He tells me I have the nerve to bitch about the toothpaste cap while I leave the toilet seat up- can you believe that? As if these two concepts are _equitable_.” Rin scoffs.

“Totally non sequitur,” Makoto goads.

Rin nods along, an angry pink on his cheeks as he relives his travesty. “How did you- that is _exactly_ what I said. And then he tells me then I speak like an idiot pretending to be smart, and that because of it my Hamlet isn’t even believable! And that was _it_ , Makoto. It was my final straw. I can’t take it anymore! I can’t live with him! He is ungrateful, inconsiderate, entirely _rude_.”

Rin taps out each pejorative with a straight index finger into the bar top. “So I told him to get his shit, I never want to see him again-”

“But Haru is Ophelia.”

“Like hell he is!” Rin roars. “Not after he didn’t show up for dress rehearsal this morning! I called Nagisa instead.”

“Nagisa. As Ophelia. The tragic, serious woman made mad from grief and driven to suicide?”

“It was _not_ suicide! She wasn’t mad from _grief!_ She was _incapable of her own distress_ after falling into the brook and the madness was caused by her inability to reconcile her duty with her passion, and others around her pressure her, trap her, make her feel- ugh! Forget it. God, Makoto. I can’t talk to you about anything.”

Makoto shrugs. “Tomato, to-mah-to.”

He glowers. “You are uncultured and everything that is wrong with modern society. Only people who don’t understand the nuances of the Bard would call it _suicide._ ”

“You got me there, Rin.”

It is officially noon, so Makoto makes his way to the door to flip on his neon _open_ sign. When he returns to his register, Rin has entered his customary self-pitying sulk that follows whatever rage bender he has put himself upon. He slumps to the right on his folded arm, so close to the surface of the bar his woeful exhales condense moisture over the freshly laid topcoat. Dramatic, edging on pathetic.

Actors.

“Rin.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You guys will make up.”

“Not this time. I meant it. I want him gone, I can’t stand him! I never loved him!”

Makoto raises an eyebrow and takes a second gamble against Rin’s knowledge. “Haru was wrong, you are clearly a great Hamlet.”

Rin grunts dismissively. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. You know, you sulk worse than Sousuke does.”

Rin glares at him again. “How dare you compare me to _that_.”

Gou finally emerges from the back joining Makoto’s side and tilting her head curiously at the sight of her brother. “To what?”

“I’m not anything like Sousuke.”

“You’re so much like Sousuke it sickens me,” Gou mutters. “What’s wrong? You and Haru get back together and break up again? How many times is that since I saw you last?”

“We broke up for good! You’re so insensitive!”

“You said that last time.”

Makoto elbows Gou lightly in admonishment. There’s no reason to agitate Rin further, or else he won’t leave and go do something productive. She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t continue her crusade. Rin raises his miserable hand along with his miserable head, and gestures to the tap.

“Hit me.”

Makoto was afraid of this. “Your tab is maxed out, Rin.”

“How the fuck so?!” Rin squawks, sitting up rigidly. “I just squared it last week!”

“Well you were here with Haru last weekend…”

Because when they’re together and the planets have aligned towards their happiness (all two hours of it at a time on average), the entire bar gets a round of drinks… or three. On Rin’s tab. Which Gou is all too happy to charge him. When Makoto tries to talk him out of it, he’s told to replace the stick up his ass with Sousuke’s dick and live a little. By that point, Makoto racks up Rin’s tab as he wishes out of spite. Either way, no one’s keeping Rin from reaching for the stars on his thirty-hundred thousand tab limit. Recently lowered from thirty-five due to chronic non-payment.

Rin adopts a sudden softness, the association bar debts bring balming over him and all of his strife. “That was the night he laughed at one of my jokes for the first time…”

“Jesus,” Makoto sighs. “Paying up now then?”

“We’re not all made of money like you are, Makoto,” Rin snaps. “I’m good for it, I’ll pay you when I get it… teaching an improv class at the elementary school next week.”

“I am… so far from made of money,” Makoto balks in disbelief. He can’t even fathom being anything other than the asshole that barks at his boyfriend for leaving on every light in the house. He’s also so cheap he knows exactly how much that school pays for Rin to show up and teach at (if that’s really what he does) and it is not anywhere near thirty thousand.

“You own a _business_.”

Gou gapes. “And you are out of touch with what that means.”

Rin rolls his eyes. “Okay, sure, but Sousuke is basically an internet celebrity-”

“Dooooon’t,” Makoto warns in the same tone and dropping elongation he disciplines the dog with. “No. Don’t go there. It is too early for your lack of tact.”

Rin chuckles, a teeth-grind inducing haughtiness he has no business wielding. “There is no tact in amateur porn, Makoto.”

Makoto turns to Gou, who has already smacked the heel of her palm to her forehead. “Is it your turn to kick him out or mine? He’s still sober; this has to be a record.”

“Wait wait,” Rin backpedals. “Come on. I don’t mean it like that. I mean he’d probably laugh if you implied his job was like, _art_ -,” he pauses to snort at the very idea, “-or something.”

Gou sets her hands on her hips, a gesture foreboding certain death in her language. Rin sits up straighter and frowns, but he certainly isn’t stupid enough to say anything else. “Don’t be petty because he’s a better actor than you _and_ makes a living off it.”

Rin jumps off his stool so quickly it topples over and follows it up with an index finger jabbed in her direction. “Low blow! _Low blow!”_ he screeches.

“Be gone, demon,” Gou shoos. “Go be condescending somewhere else and for fuck’s _sake_ get a steady job while you’re at it!”

“Well it’s hard enough performing Shakespeare in Japan, and if you’d let me sell tickets at the bar-”

“No!” Makoto and Gou shout together with enough force to send Rin back two steps toward the door.

Rin squares his shoulders and just his lower jaw forward in defiance. “ _Touchy_. Why you guys bein’ pricks? Just because you had to count a few boxes?”

“Come back later, Rin,” Makoto concedes, earning himself a glare of betrayal from his co-owner. Rin’s insufferable when he’s in the middle of a production, or in a relationship, or recently broken up (so most of the time), but he’s still a close friend for better or worse. “Don’t wallow here all day when you have a show to work on.”

With newfound resolve, Rin hikes his leggings up and brushes his poet shirt down to a few stages less frumpy than when he walked in. “You’re right about Nagisa,” Rin gets through his ego, somehow. It’s Rin-speak for _I’m sorry_.

“I forgive you.”

He’s gone after a curt nod, leaving Makoto and Gou to an entire thirty seconds of silence, blessed silence, before the first paying customer strolls in for lunchtime tequila. Makoto’s previously strong sense of self-righteous judgement went to the wind two minutes into a public blowjob within one hundred feet of an ancient, honored shrine seven years ago. He even waved it goodbye. So what’s a flight of shots before returning to four more hours of data entry?

He pours out five and gives the guy four.

* * *

 

Tonka doesn’t barrell all three pounds of his min-pin self into Makoto when he gets home after one in the morning, indicating the dog is in the bedroom, Sousuke’s gone to sleep, and Makoto is free to stomp around without fear of interrupting anything important.

He hates, hates, _hates_ days like this. The perfect storm of inconvenience. A morning of inventory and a maximum occupancy evening locked him into this abhorrent sixteen-hour shift, where not even his ninety-minute break could be fully realized when Gou found herself too overwhelmed with customers forty minutes into it to keep up.

Coupled with what Sousuke refers to as an occasionally necessary shut-in editing day, since he knew Makoto was busy counting boxes anyway, Makoto’s feeling rightly petulant and frazzled as he makes himself toast and eats it over the sink in a deep pout. If he has a long, bad day like this, at least Sousuke’s usually filming, and can send him a nicely graphic pick-me-up at some point.

His phone lights up from the corner of his eye as he finishes and he drags it across the counter to peck at it mostly out of habit, as he doesn’t feel like talking to anyone else today. It’s a photo from Haru without a caption to respond to, which is a welcome sight. The photo is a progress shot of the deep maroon robe he’s been working on and modifying for Rin’s Hamlet costume.

Haru’s been embroidering a weave of golden roses around the cuffs of the sleeves, around the collar, and down either side of the split down the front. He started it a long time ago as a surprise, before Rin ever committed to his next grand production, knowing he’d need it for something someday. After months of working on nearly nothing but that, it looks like Haru is nearly finished with it, lining up well with Rin’s opening night three weeks from now. By Makoto’s estimate it should be enough of a loving surprise to keep them blissfully together for as long as a month this time.

Makoto gives in and responds _this is beautiful_ just as Haru sends _if he throws my jammers out the window again I’m lighting this on fire in front of him._

 _aww,_ Makoto texts back, _that is so sweet._

It checks over as read, but Haru doesn’t send anything else after it. Makoto leaves his phone where it lies and makes for the shower before he’s too tired to do so. On days like this, he skips the bedroom for the couch. Too much work and exhaustion makes him ironically restless, and thus a terrible bedmate. But this time Sousuke’s left him a tented, to-the-point and bolded note centered on the couch cushion: _**No.**_

Makoto smiles to himself. It’s just the sort of warmth he didn’t know he needed today.

Tonka always gets to break the rules and sleep in the room when Mean Dad is gone, so Makoto understands the dog’s glare of righteous indignation when he cracks the door to the bedroom open. To make it worse, Makoto follows it up with a gesture of his head outwards and sharp hiss of unspoken command to get out, dropping him an additional two spots on Tonka’s shitlist, placing him perilously close to Rin’s permanent rock-bottom position.

Makoto loves the dog, hell he’s the undisputed biggest animal lover of the group, but not in his goddamned bedroom.

Sousuke doesn’t stir under the shift in weight on the bed as Makoto lowers himself onto it. Typically he would at least whine in his sleep at the disturbance, but he must’ve had a long day as well. He’s on his back with his phone flat on his chest, and Makoto’s been around too long to make any romantic notion of it. He fell asleep texting Rin, which isn’t as uncommon as someone might assume given Sousuke’s eternally done with it demeanor.

Sousuke either has infinite patience for his friend or he owes Rin a large debt Makoto doesn’t know about to be willing to talk to Rin literally every time something goes awry in his life. Makoto tries his best to be there for his friends but his best still isn’t as selfless and as effortlessly subtle as Sousuke’s. It’s endearing all the same, Makoto concedes as he moves the phone off Sousuke’s chest and sets it gingerly on the nightstand. His is a strong and quiet heart Makoto aspires to.

As he returns his arm to himself he brushes the back of his hand along Sousuke’s forehead. Through years of trial and error, it’s the only gesture Makoto’s discovered that doesn’t immediately wake the other up. It has an added benefit of reassuring him that Sousuke isn’t also running a rogue fever, since he’d never admit if he were and Makoto’s all about consolidation these days. But a rare stab of selfish longing keeps him from fully committing to his foreboding restlessness, and he flips his hand over to wake Sousuke from a deep sleep, palm pressed firmly to his cheek.

No matter the conditions, unless he wakes up naturally, Sousuke always startles to consciousness. His brow drops over wide and dilated eyes and his lips part to quietly gasp. Makoto chuckles. “Surprise?”

“I dreamed I killed you,” he croaks with urgency.

Makoto’s eyebrows bounce tall. “Oh?”

Sousuke’s shock softens and he adopts the bleary, squinty face that’s more becoming of a person woken up abruptly in the middle of the night. “I didn’t clean out the fridge and you ate something that went bad and you died. You came back to haunt me and were a real dickhead about it. Kept moving my shit around. Hiding in the curtains.”

Makoto grins despite the seriousness weighting Sousuke’s tone. “Leaving spoiled food in the fridge sounds more like something I’d do, and a haunting sounds more like you.”

“I’d never haunt you. Too easy. I like more of a challenge.”

Makoto moves his hand to pinch Sousuke’s cheeks between his thumb and fingertips, pushing his lips forward to a fish pout. “That’s not nice.”

“Yo’ wo’ muh uh,” Sousuke retorts with difficulty.

“I did.” Makoto releases Sousuke’s face and dips to kiss him lightly, as it suddenly reveals itself as the reason he bothered. “That’s all. Go back to sleep.”

Sousuke waits for Makoto to roll onto his back, then flips onto his side to face him. “Did you tell Rin Ophelia committed suicide? It’s concerning he asked me _today_ , considering his debut is in a few weeks.”

When Makoto turns, Sousuke’s already inched closer, leaving them a mere few inches apart. “I didn’t mean to tailspin him into a crisis,” Makoto laughs. “I thought it was common knowledge. So is it a suicide?”

Sousuke hums thoughtfully and drawn out for a moment, mining for a way to present his argument. “If Haru went for a swim and refused to resurface and drowned- we could be so fucking lucky, first of all. But would you call it that?”

Makoto snorts and shoves him gently on the shoulder. “Yes? I remember when you studied it, and it was always referred to as intentional then.”

“That’s the easiest way to talk about it, but it’s debateable. She wasn’t herself, you could argue the madness angle and think of it as an accident. But regardless she let herself sink when she didn’t have to. It’s more grey than one way or the other in the end depending where you’re splitting hairs. Rin’s an optimist, so he might not see it so bleak and deliberate as you or I would.”

As Sousuke speaks, Makoto admires the spark that never really left him pulling him from sleepiness, and how easy it is to bring it back to light up Sousuke’s face should Makoto want to see it. Sousuke’s formal study of the arts is a chapter long gone and filed away in their lives, but his passion for it never wavered.

He used to prattle off about these things until he wore himself out, and answered any question Makoto came up with no matter how obvious, and even continued to love Makoto the one time he asked what was so special about the _Minami-za._ It’s easily one of Makoto’s favorite things about him and even now he’ll catch Sousuke in his old books or searching the internet for a foreign performance Rin recommended he watch. Makoto can only dream of a passion like that for himself.

“What’s that look for?” Sousuke murmurs, slotting his hand in the curve of Makoto’s waist. “Like you got some sort of crush.”

“I’m thinking about how tomorrow’s filming day, and if I can afford to get away for two hours to take advantage of it,” Makoto jests. Sousuke already knows what Makoto looks like when he’s silently admiring him and that admiration makes no effort to look like anything else in the shared privacy between them. “I love when you do the work for me. Then it’s just walk in, strip down, lube up, go to town, you know?”

Sousuke rolls his eyes and shuts Makoto up with a kiss a bit more open-ended than before, and a lot more into the idea of tomorrow now. He still tastes like mouthwash, and his grip sliding to squeeze Makoto’s ass is surprisingly strong for the hour. Makoto’s libido is also surprisingly strong, pushing him closer to his favorite studied thespian turned amateur pornstar and even lending him the confidence to reach behind himself to snatch Sousuke’s wrist and guide him to where Makoto would much rather experience his practiced touch.

Tomorrow- today?- Makoto will be an optimist too.


End file.
